Episode 57: Design in Times of Crisis with Alice Rawsthorn and Ayşe Elif Yildirim

Today, we have planned something extraordinary for you. We finished the last season with a little riddle and asked our audience to guess who was the Special Legal Design Santa in our season finale. We received some answers, thank you for those, and the promised prize was drawn. Our lucky winner is Elif Yildirim, a lawyer and legal design student from Turkey and we invited Elif to plan and co-host an episode with us and what an episode it turned out to be!  Alice Rawsthorn, a British Design Critic and author joined us to discuss about design as an attitude and how it can be incorporated into law. Alice talks about why great design is a human right and explains how we understand design and its potential in different fields of life and what is the level of importance to incorporate design into our responses in times of crisis, such as in the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. We also talk about how design, or design thinking, has increasingly gained popularity in different fields of professions, and law is just one of the examples. Alice explains if there are some “red flags” in this development. -- Alice Rawsthorn is an award-winning design critic and author, whose books include Design as an Attitude, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with Paola Antonelli, senior curator of design at MoMA, New York. Alice’s weekly design column for The New York Times was syndicated worldwide for over a decade. In all her work, Alice champions design’s potential as a social, political and ecological tool that can help to foster positive change. Born in Manchester and based in London, she is a founding member of the Writers for Liberty campaign for human rights and of the advisory board of the Democracy Next research and action institute as well as a member of the UK government’s Honors Committee for arts and Media. Alice and Paola are co-founders of Design Emergency, a podcast andmin research platform that investigates design’s role in forging a fairer future. Ayşe Elif Yıldırım is a lawyer and academic and most recently a Visual Communication Design student. After traveling and living in many countries of Europe, she is now based in Ankara, Turkey. She has several academic degrees in different fields of law, most recently she was granted her Ph.D. degree with distinction for her doctoral research conducted under the scholarship of Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology in the field of Business and Human Rights. Always being interested in interdisciplinary fields of work that combine two distinct ways of thinking, Elif is now focusing on Legal Design and how we can use it to solve complex challenges we are facing in our contemporary world.